Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday November 07, 2006 @09:56AM
from the we-get-to-pick dept.

Hennell writes "Reporters without borders has just released its annual list of internet enemies, a list of countries 'that systematically violate online free expression.' A couple of countries have been removed, but Egypt has been added. A detailed summary can be read on the BBC Website." From that article: "The blacklist is published annually but it is the first time RSF has organized an online protest to accompany the list. 'We wanted to mobilize net users so that when we lobby certain countries we can say that the concerns are not just ours but those of thousands of internet users around the world,' said a spokesman for RSF. Many of those on the internet blacklist are countries that are regularly criticized by human rights groups, such as China and Burma."

We should keep in mind that the Internet would likely not be here, or much later, if it won't be for the Sputnik Crisis and the programs it spawned, which includes establishing ARPA. Therefore we can indirectly thank Russians for the Net.

One would hope that large companies would consider close collaroration with the government of a country on the list something of a blemish on their character. However, I doubt this will be the case. What is needed is for consumers to start considering the ethics of those they purchase from. We need to give companies a choice - you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.

you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.

Moral fiber and psychic powers. There simply isn't enough transparency in corporations to figure out whether they are acting ethically or not in most cases, unless they do something really reprehensible and a government gets involved and compels transparency, or someone on the inside finally decides that having a job is no longer worth it.

you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.

Hello! May I be the first to welcome you to our planet. You may find things here a little unsettling, coming from your obviously very advanced civilization and culture; in the meantime I recommend you don't try to make sense of anything.

I consider it far more likely to be a fluff piece to get the techies voting for continued US warmongering, given it's fortuitous release on the day of an important US vote.

Reporters Without Borders is the organization that keeps downgrading the US on "press freedom" because the US government seems to think that journalists aren't above the law. By its past behavior, they're much more likely to be spreading anti- rather than pro-American propaganda.

I guess that depends whether you look at what else happens during significant press events.

Politicians and corps tend to make interesting moves while the public is distracted. Outrage over "terrorism", "human rights violations", and "think of the children" issues hold the public attention away from other issues. With the right emphasis and spin, they get used to justify actions that the public would normally object to.

Given the track record on proving WMD, exagerration of China's human rights issues,

You can hardly compare the civil attacks on one piece of software that was designed to allow copying of content which the seller had restricted (no matter how right you might think that is, and I'm not arguing the point) with the systematic censorship of any political or otherwise controversial electronic communication. The fact that you would even bring that up in this context demonstrates that you MUST live in a country which is shockingly low in censorship when compared to t

You're just trolling by asking about the US, but Cuba is a valid one that I was going to question myself. At the recent UN summit on internet access, it was alleged that "Zero percent of Cubans are connected to the Internet [com.com] because of the censorship hold that the authorities there have over their people.

Why would you assume I'm in Cuba or even Cuban? I'm just someone that has spent several years in Cuba and several years in the US. I see how the US has become a police state. I see how the Republicans have destroyed every freedom you people ever had. I see people that hate life and want to kill others simply because they don't want to live themselves. I see people that are so violent that they think they have the right to own a gun! A gun! There are many people in the US that even own weapons of war. Here

Visitors to the RSF website are also invited to leave a voice message for Yahoo's co-founder Jerry Yang, expressing their views on the firm's involvement in China

Interestingly enough, you don't have to be a Chinese reporter [bbc.co.uk] for Yahoo to give away your private info. For every email you send from Yahoo mail, the IP address from where you sent is is disclosed to the receiver.

For every email you send from Yahoo mail, the IP address from where you sent is is disclosed to the receiver.

Now, I am not in any way defending Yahoo's reprehensible conduct in China, but the behavior that you describe regarding IP addresses in mail headers is the way things are supposed to work. The address of the originating machine should be listed as the first of the 'Received' headers. This just makes sense -- it's not "Yahoo" that's sending you the message, they're just passing it on behalf of some ot

Countries which censor or curtail Internet usage (with the obvious exception of China, with its staggering size and mobility) are hardly "enemies" of the Internet - they can't attack it and expect any degree of success. Instead they're foolishly short-sighted, unable to comprehend the massive technological disadvantage any such action entails in the long run. The problem is, this usually correlates with general incompetence, which means many of these countries will become (or already are) failed states which require outside assistance.

A great many of the small countries on the list have detained citizens for expressing themselves freely online. Even if the country is small, that is another part of the world where people are not free to share ideas. That is the basic freedom that made the Internet what it is.Individually, it would be difficult for these nations to have an impact on the Internet as a whole. However, it sure puts a damper on it for its own citizens. Many of these people are not free to leave their country to find an unf

Three countries - Nepal, Maldives and Libya - have been removed from the annual list of Internet enemies, which Reporters Without Borders publishes today. But many bloggers were harassed and imprisoned this year in Egypt, so it has been added to the roll of shame reserved for countries that systematically violate online free expression.

Countries in alphabetical order:

- Belarus

The government has a monopoly of telecommunications and does not hesitate to block access to opposition websites if it feels the need, especially at election time. Independent online publications are also often hacked. In March 2006, for example, several websites critical of President Alexandre Lukashenko mysteriously disappeared from the Internet for several days.

Burma

The Burmese governments Internet policies are even more repressive than those of its Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours. The military junta clearly filters opposition websites. It keeps a very close eye on Internet cafes, in which the computers automatically execute screen captures every five minutes, in order to monitor user activity. The authorities targeted Internet telephony and chat services in June, blocking Googles Gtalk, for example. The aim was two-fold: to defend the profitable long-distance telecommunications market, which is controlled by state companies, as well as to stop cyber-dissidents from using a means of communication that is hard to monitor.

China

China unquestionably continues to be the worlds most advanced country in Internet filtering. The authorities carefully monitor technological progress to ensure that no new window of free expression opens up, After initially targeting websites and chat forums, they nowadays concentrate on blogs and video exchange sites. China now has nearly 17 million bloggers. This is an enormous number, but very few of them dare to tackle sensitive issues, still less criticise government policy. Firstly, because Chinas blog tools all include filters that block subversive word strings. Secondly, because the companies operating these services, both Chinese and foreign, are pressured by the authorities to control content. They employ armies of moderators to clean up the content produced by the bloggers. Finally, in a country in which 52 people are currently in prison for expressing themselves too freely online, self-censorship is obviously in full force. Just five years ago, many people thought Chinese society and politics would be revolutionised by the Internet, a supposedly uncontrollable medium. Now, with China enjoying increasing geopolitical influence, people are wondering the opposite, whether perhaps Chinas Internet model, based on censorship and surveillance, may one day be imposed on the rest of the world.

Cuba

With less than 2 per cent of its population online, Cuba is one of the most backward Internet countries. An investigation carried out by Reporters Without Borders in October revealed that the Cuban government uses several levers to ensure that this medium is not used in a counter-revolutionary way. Firstly, it has more or less banned private Internet connections. To surf the Internet or check their e-mail, Cubans have to go to public access points such as Internet cafes, universities and youth computer clubs where their activity is more easily monitored. Secondly, the computers in all the Internet cafes and leading hotels contain software installed by the Cuban police that triggers an alert message whenever subversive key-words are spotted. The regime also ensures that there is no Internet access for dissidents and independent journalists, for whom communicating with people abroad is an ordeal. Fina

You forgot "non-text e-mail". That includes UUE, MIME and HTML. They should be totally disallowed.

If we hadn't strayed from the path of plain text, practically all of its problems wouldn't exist today. Somehow, I think that not being able to make your text pink is a small price to pay for that. We can scan text for spam, but we sure as hell can't scan images.

The United States. God bless our founding fathers for writing the first amendment so clearly. It makes targeting scoundrels that much easier. Anyone who gets fundamentally confused by it is either too stupid to function or evil. Makes fighting back a lot easier because unlike in Europe, if the day ever comes, patriots here could shoot the censors with a clear conscience.

If anyone here knows the UK's Channel 4 series 'Fr Ted', then lemme say this: this list reminds me of fr Noel Furlong priest when he goes to put Tony on his little 'list of enemies'. I guess you had to be there at the time,

And why would the USA be on the list and not Germany or France? Germany outright bans certain speech and political thought (i.e. Nazism). France bans both Nazism and denial of the Armenian genocide. Such bans are unconstitutional in the USA.

Neither the USA, France, or Germany deserve to be on this list, because their restrictions, such as they are, are rather mild. I think your anti-Americanism has gotten the better of you, or you're trolling.

Nice troll moderation, except when you think that all of those countries listed here are in the UN, and some of them have a lot of power and a history of getting on commissions where the don't belong. China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia (all on this list) are currently sitting on the UN Human Rights Council despite rules meant to keep countries with a policy of human rights abuses from being members. You can bet that China and one or more of the others will be on any Internet Governance Council in the fut

"We wanted to mobilise net users so that when we lobby certain countries we can say that the concerns are not just ours but those of thousands of internet users around the world,"... Many of those on the internet blacklist are countries that are regularly criticised by human rights groups, such as China and Burma.

Hmm. Let's see what the tradeoffs for China are in this situation.

On one hand, they have total control of 1 billion human beings if they control what they read, hear, and say.

An enemy means you oppose the device. Reading this list I don't see many that are "we will destroy the internet" (though I'm sure that's they don't love it) This appears more to be enemy of free speech or radical thinking, which winds up with censorship of the internet.

Although we know you are sorry [sorryeverybody.com] and even more people than the ones who voted against your current regime are sorry now, now it is the time for you to make the difference.Please go out and vote, and if you know someone who does not want to vote please convince him/her to vote. It is on your hands the power to finish the war and terrorism. Vote to remove the totalitarian regime from your beautiful country and to start restoring the rights your government has removed from you.

Okay, I fully accept that I'm going to be modded off-topic, too, but...

Who are we supposed to vote for? Bush is out of office no matter what we do, and you can bet the 2 running for office will be about equals in terms of good and bad. There's no other -serious- contenders out there.

Doug Stanhope, the comedian, is running for President in 08. He's serious and I'm seriously voting for him since he's not going to waffle or lie if he doesn't yet know what to do about an issue. http://www.dougstanhope.com/ [dougstanhope.com] for more info and links to his myspace pages that tell more than I can.

Please don't be obtuse. The term 'American', used the world over refers specifically to citizens and residents of the United States. People don't refer to Mexicans, Canadians, Columbians, etc. as Americans, nor do those people refer to themselves that way either.

I paid very close attention to the parent post. If he was trying to make the point you assign him, he didn't do a very good job, as it came off simply as a pedantic point about the names of continents and the countries they contain. Nevertheless, if that was the intended point, you will find little disagreement from me; obviously decisions one place affect people in others, and American decisions tend to have a disproportionate impact relative to many other countries due to its relative economic and militar

You are mistaken. When it comes to elections - whether they are in Mexico or in the USofA, we are ALL Americans. Your decisions affect us. Our decisions affect you.

As do the decisions of citizens of Spain and France, but that doesn't make them Americans.

The purpose of language is to convey understanding; if your words are consistently misunderstood, then you're using the language incorrectly. If you use the word "American," people will almost invariably understand you to mean a citizen of the United Sta

They're probably calling it Burma [wikipedia.org] in protest of the military government there, one of whose changes was the name. It's not uncommon. For example, this [mises.org] non-crank author does it.

And I seriously doubt "human rights groups" put "profiteering" on the same level as e.g. torture and racism. Where are the human rights protests over Microsoft?

I would like to apologize to all the Germans for calling their country Germany (Deutschland). I would like to also appologize to the citizens of Japan (Nihon), Vienna (Vien), Cologne (Koln), Rome (Roma), Bombay (Mumbai), Lisbon (Lisboa), Warsaw (Warszawa), and Leghorn (Livorno). I would also like to apologize to the Dutch (Nederlanders). Please accept my apology on behalf of all English speaking peoples everywhere for using perfectly proper english names for your countries, people, languages, and cities when speaking English. I shall henceforth brush up on my Japanese, Hindi, German, and Polish, and every other languange in the world so I can refere to you in your native language, even when speaking my own.

Um, shouldn't this comment be applied to the poster I was responding to? I was defending the use of the alternate term.

Of course, even that poster wasn't criticizing the use of a term different from what natives call the country; he was criticizing the use of a term different from the one natives (well, the government there) ask English-speakers to call it.

It gets especially silly when they get into pronunciation. Is Qatar "cutter", "cotter", "gutter", "catarrh", or one of the variations that can't even be spelled out using ordinary English letters? This is important, people. We need the one true proncunciation so that Wolf Blitzer doesn't feel stupid when reading the teleprompter.

I've not yet seen anyone argue that the US is currently worse than China. I've seen the occasional moral relativist argue that it isn't possible to judge the Chinese government, but that isn't the same position to take, and in any case few people these days take moral relativism very seriously.

What I have seen argued is that the US is slipping. What gives most Americans the high ground when comparing the US government to the PRC's? The fact that the latter espouses censorship, torture, invasion of privacy, strongarm military policies, and general human rights and due process violations. Americans are protected by the constitution and a multitude of checks and balances. Erosion of those protections is the concern.

If the US loses that high ground, you've got a problem. Do you really want your country to only be no worse than China? It would be one thing if that meant that the Chinese government had decided to treat its citizens better, but it's quite another if the US drops down to their current level of rights.

America isn't there yet, not by a long shot, and the constant cries of "OMG, Orwell" do grow a little tiresome, but the underlying concern is completely valid. It is easier to protect your rights in the here and now than it is to try and fight for them once they're gone.

How far back do you want to compare? I'd fully agree that the United States of the 1950's was less free than the US of today, but that isn't the point. To take an arbitrary point in time and say "it was worse then" tells you very little about what progress is being made now. Likewise, to take an oppressive totalitarian regime like the PRC and say "it's worse over there" (an argument I see all too often here) doesn't tell you what it's like at home.To reverse the situation, is the US as of 2006 a freer pl

The cold war is long over, and the worst deprivations of civil rights were done by people like McCarthy 40+ years ago.

Hi, welcome back from your multi decade nap, hope it went well for you.

As you clearly know nothing about recent events, allow me to bring you up to speed.Recently Congress passed and the president signed a bill that allows the president to have any American citizen shipped away to a death camp to be tortured and murdered solely upon his whim with no possibility of recourse to the law.

True, but my counterpoint still stands. Is the US today freer than it was before the DMCA, PATRIOT act, warrentless wiretapping, etc? Do those not constitue "slipping"?If you choose to compare the US of a decade or so ago with the US today, then yes, it is slipping. Compare it to the US of the McCarthy era and it's progressing. It's all in what point of reference you use to compare it to.

Which is exactly why I said that cherry picking an era to make the current state of affairs look better or worse isn'

Obviously the poster lives in one of the 13 countries. I managed to get ahold of the uncensored version, posted below.My fellow slashdotters, this article couldn't be more right! The censorship in China is known by everyone, and is largely effective. It's the absolute truth. Freedom and liberty are severly curtailed in China, anyone that speaks out against the government is rounded up and never heard from again. Sorry, I must go now. It took a bit of doing to get past the firewall to even read the slash